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Guy Charusadhirakul manages business development for Google Play in Southeast Asia, helping to grow the ecosystem of game and app developers in the region as he assists them to build successful global businesses using Google Play. Guy especially enjoys working with the creative people who are building fun, unique games, helping them reach millions of players globally and succeed with their businesses. Recently Gamesauce was able to interview Guy about his work with Google Play.

Gamesauce: Tell us about the work you do at your company. How did you come to work at your current company?

Guy Charusadhirakul: I manage business development for Google Play in Southeast Asia. Basically, that means I help grow ecosystem of game and app developers in the region and help them build successful global business with Google Play.

Barak Regev, Director of Google Cloud Platform for EMEA of Google, says that the best things about working for Google are the amazing people, as well as the culture, goals and freedom of working at Google.

Barak Regev is Director of Google Cloud Platform, EMEA of Google

Barak had worked for Microsoft for seven years when Meir Brand, GM of Google IL, called, offering the opportunity to apply for a position establishing Google Enterprise in the EMEA region. This was six and a half years ago, and Barak was, of course interested. For the past four years, he has been leading the Google Cloud Platform business in EMEA, building and scaling the EMEA team responsible for sales and business development of Google’s Cloud Platform solutions. In this position, Barak must also hire the talent, expand Google’s ecosystem, evangelize Google’s solutions and, as he said, “inspire my people to think big.”

Max Clark is Chief Revenue Officer at mParticle, overseeing the company’s sales and growth efforts. Along with the rest of their team, Max works to support leading multi-screen brands in connecting their customer data with the leading marketing, analytics and warehousing tools. Until now, both marketers and engineers have struggled to connect all their data and use it in real, meaningful ways. Max recognized that mobile and the new multi-screen experiences have changed the way businesses approach their data and wanted to be a part of a larger solution for them. mParticle is a company that solves this problem in a way no other company can. This is why, Max asserts, that it is so easy to do his job as CRO, talking to the world’s largest brands about where and how mParticle fits into their business.

Netflix for movies, Spotify for music, but nothing like that for games… so Rovio, who many just know as creators of Angry Birds, have corrected it by coming up with Hatch: a free-to-play mobile game streaming service that will first come to the Android platform. Instead of downloading a game on your phone, you stream it through an app, whose backend cloud infrastructure makes it possible to play without lag. What is more, you can hand the controls to a friend, therefore turning a single-player game into a multiplayer experience. Hatch founder and CEO Juhani Honkala told Gamesauce more about Hatch-ing the new project.

FlowPlay has appointed Joshua Granick to be scientist-in-residence. Joshua will help FlowPlay’s platform grow and change, though will remain with OpenFL as managing director. FlowPlay is in the process of transitioning Vegas World to OpenFL and plans to do so with its games that are present and future to the engine.

“Thousands of games, technologies and industries are already using OpenFL, and it’s a perfect fit to enable FlowPlay’s future development plans,” said Joshua. “By transitioning to OpenFL, FlowPlay has increased the versatility of the company’s multiplayer platform while accelerating development times and freeing up more resources to focus on new innovation. I’m eager to become a part of that process and help raise awareness on how OpenFL can help other developers in the casual games industry.”

Part of OpenFL’s appeal and reason for its rapid expansion is the fact that it’s open-source software. Joshua says they want to make the world a better place using OpenFL. They feel like making OpenFL a paid product would work against that goal.

Video ads are quickly becoming the advertising industry’s new mainstay. Gone are the days of static placements and banner ads. At Casual Connect USA 2016, MoPub’s group product manager, Boris Logvinskiy, explained why video has become such an important advertising format during his lecture Rewarded Video: Optimize Your Strategy.

At GDC 2016 King presented the Defold that is now available for anyone who wants to make games, pointing out its advantages as being lightweight, cross-platform, highly optimized and aimed on cross-function teams. Gamesauce tried to define the niche Defold is aiming to occupy in the settled and competitive engines market, with known favorites for both aspiring and experienced devs, and why King thinks their engine has high chances for success.

King’s CTO and co-founder Thomas Hartwig explained his vision of why Defold has its specific audience to engage.

Video games weren’t always played at home. When the industry first started, video games were found in arcades alongside rows of pinball machines. From the beginning the very idea of playing a video game was engaging to players because they could interact with content on a video display like never before. This was a novel idea; unlike starring passively into TV screens. Now they could compete and challenge others just like pinball, but with fictional environments as wild as their imagination.

Driven by a desire to create games that come alive and resonate with players, Vladimir Funtikov co-founded Tallinn-based Creative Mobile, and after only four years, it became one of the largest mobile gaming companies in Northern Europe. His passion for games began with his first PC, and almost immediately, he started creating games, beginning with basic Warcraft and SimCity scenarios, then moving to single-player levels for Duke Nukem 3D, and eventually making multi-player maps for Counter-Strike.

Mark Robinson likens the experience of data-mining to exploring a new city, noting “I have always liked being lost … and then uncovering something surprising and thought-provoking.”

Robinson has been tackling data analytics and helping bring companies closer to their customers for over 15 years. But one sector has been lagging in connecting with their user base. “The (gaming) industry lives with retention rates that are too low,” Robinson says. “And it’s our fault, not the players. By getting closer to the players, we can understand their frustrations and deliver fun more consistently.”